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James_Miller comments on Taking Effective Altruism Seriously - Less Wrong
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I bet it is not.
People who want to buy their kids Harvard admission just do it directly: you give Harvard $X million and the admissions office accepts your kid (usually).
Think a bit: what kind of a useful advice can one give to managers of a $36 billion fund? That some company is about to be taken over? They don't care. There is not enough liquidity in the market for them to buy enough of the target stock to move their needle.
Very large funds are peculiar creatures: their freedom of action is severely constrained by their size and their investment choices largely boil down to slow drifts in asset class allocations.
Oh, and the characterization of Harvard (all Ivies, actually) as an investment business with a very minor sideline in higher education is common and even, ahem, traditional :-)
My knowledge of high finance is theoretical so this might be wrong but is $36 billion really that much compared to the size of the world's financial markets Harvard gets to play in? Yes, knowledge of one takeover wouldn't allow them to double their endowment, but knowledge of, say, ten material non-public events a year could let Harvard earn a significant above market return.
The whole market, not much, so if a fund of that size wants to shift its asset class allocaton and, say, sell a few billions of bonds and buy a variety of global equity instead, it can do this. But if, instead, it wants to buy a particular security, it can't buy much relative to its own size. Liquidity constraints are very real at this size.
$1m profit is less than 1/3 of a basis point of return for a $36B fund. It's just not worth the bother, especially given how insider trading is illegal in the US.
And the need for coordination between the admission office and the endowment manager that might leave a paper trial.